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 The
Guardian reviews 'Straight'
Saturday March 26, 2005
Straight
by Boy George, with Paul Gorman
304pp, Century, £17.99
In his introduction, Paul Gorman gives us a pen-portrait
of Boy George, whose energies formed so important a part of
1980s excess and exhibitionism. For Gorman, George is both
soft and tough, a singer of Irish rebel songs, a manic cracker
of jokes who throws tantrums but never tiaras. He gets fractious
in the early evenings but isn't too keen on the mornings either
as he washes off (with Fairy Liquid) the residue of last night's
maquillage at the kitchen sink. Perhaps there are still days
when George makes Joan Crawford look like Mother Teresa, but
this, it seems, is going to be one of those lives of pop emotion
recollected in tranquillity with all addiction spent and a
few old scores to settle.
"Portrait of the artist as survivor against all odds"
is a familiar recipe for showbiz autobiography. And many elements
of the genre are there in this book. There's the continuing
dialogue with the now dead father, who veered between the
rough and the loving. There's the to-be-expected stuff about
finding agreeably spiritual religion. There are also the judgments,
the pen-portraits, the assessments - varying between the madly
egocentric, the lofty and the charitable. There is, naturally,
Marilyn - for some the bad angel to George's wide-eyed Irish
innocence but a recurring figure because "we are sisters
under the skin". Marilyn still pops in and out of George's
life - at least in so far as a chap can while still living
with his mother in Borehamwood. Morrissey gets good marks
for being savage - but just isn't gabby enough: "We took
tea together in a Parisian hotel. I couldn't stop talking
and filling the many conversational gaps." The melancholic
songster, it is alleged, found our boy "over-bearing".
Things are little better with Prince - "The Artist Formerly
Known As Get a Personality". These two just can't get
it together - not at tea-time, or at any other subsequent
time either. Prince has a "shy persona" and the
O'Dowd we know, and some of us love, thinks "Shy is for
librarians". Meanwhile, it's good to know that the (Boy)
George v George (Michael) animus con tinues - the former finds
the latter just too preachy and lacking a sense of the absurd.
Michael's faith in growing older stands in sharp contrast
to George's consistently anarchic fun. Michael the gay evangelist?
As our George says: "Please shut up - throw her a cerise
boa."
The identification of Culture Club with the 80s was always
awkward. The real lineage was the 70s - the decade of glam
and punk and strikes, and that sense of being well up for
it while everything around you was falling down. This book
brilliantly illuminates the bogusness of a later artistic
generation's Eminem-like pose of identification with the audience
- and shows the necessary reality of the gap between star
and fan.
Straight, with its take on the business of being Irish, gay,
big, noisy and clever, is disjointed but well-endowed with
a shafting wit. Conventional chronology goes out of the window.
What this book records with excruciating honesty is the heartlessness,
the energy, the materialism, the shifting allegiances and
hierarchies, the animosity between the musical styles of those
different tribes - the bands, the companies, and the clubs
- that contribute to the creativity of popular music.
Much of the book is also a user-friendly guide to gay life
and mores over the past 20 years in London and New York. And
in that capacity George's natural talent for the one-liner
gets a regular outing: "Heat is the enemy of drag"-
which is why he refused to go on to I'm a Celebrity, Get Me
Out of Here! And readers on the straighter end of the scale
will be grateful for the guidance that a "Muscle Mary"
is a man who trains at the gym to look like a construction
worker but ends up looking like Jane Mansfield.
But despite all the boas and the feathers, the shoes, the
sequins and the hats, it's the make-up that lasts and doesn't
run away. George's gayness was an admirably frightening commodity
and his personality, in all its angular charm, subverted mainstream
gay culture with its easy codes of self-identity. He wasn't
feminine like Marilyn (he had the build of a roaring-boy),
but with his application of mascara and eye-liner he threatened
the precariously constructed codes of fem and butch, camp
and straight-acting. George never assimilated and never conformed.
And he can still offend, with his observation in this book
of the nasal tone of the "cartoon homosexuals",
the "cupcake queers".
Straight communicates and expresses the energy of an intelligent
anarchist holding an anti-bullshit device. But for the second
edition - please - not so much about "what Lord Buddha
did for me".
Source: This
review was published by The Guardian, Saturday March 19, 2005,
there is also an interview, please click this link.
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/ Jessica Hansson 
